Innocent Home Owners Suffer Due to Crimes Committed on their Open WiFi

There are no "innocent home owners" here. Enough has been said, in every way possible, about the importance of securing a wifi network. And its not like it takes much work at all.

I am not suggesting someone with an open network should suffer the same punishment as the criminal using it, but they are not "innocent". Certainly no more than someone connecting a windows PC to the internet without a firewall or antivirus software is "innocent" of the actions of the botnet they become part of.

Re: Innocent Home Owners Suffer Due to Crimes Committed on their Open WiFi

I beg to differ. As a home owner I lock up my gear, as a computer guy... more like security guy. I have walked into many , many situations where the router was reset to defaults because someone in the family wanted to get on the internet. and the people who purchased the gear had no idea because their computer was wired to it not on wireless.

I can't honestly count this, as I know because I had setup the wireless for them ! And made sure to secure it.

I recently had a friend in a very affluent city who had a child's friend come over and he reset the modem to default because he couldn't get his ipad on their network. I had to explain to the kid and his parent why I limited the IP pool and mac address whitelisting.... Needless to say it was not the home owners fault.. And this happens ALOT.. Now I mostly have the parent lock the main router up some where, or have them swapped over to intelligent WAPs and leave the gateway locked in the basement with the wifi turned off, but this is people with good money to do such things.-- "It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!"

The next time someone wants to borrow your car, slap them up side of the head and tell them to go get their own! They might use it to run someone over or as the getaway car in a bank robbery.

Should I choose to "share" my car with someone, I would need to give them the keys. Just as you can give someone your wifi password.

But if I were to leave it on the street, engine running, doors open, keys in the ignition, and a big "free use" sign, I could not claim to be an "innocent victim" if they ran someone over or used it as a getaway car.

Re: Fast Lanes

Yeah, don't you love the positive spin. "If Companies want to pay more to deliver their data to you faster, why that's Capitalism!"

NO. That's NOT what this is. What this is is setting up roadblocks and tollgates on lanes and then only allowing the people who pay to travel through at normal speeds..... everyone else sits in traffic jams or maybe doesn't get down the road at all!

It's no more "capitalism" then old days of the Robber barons who would build fortresses along major trade routes and then demand tribute or else the goods would be seized or destroyed! It's criminal at every level.--"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

Welcome to the Half-Duplex Internet. You get to pay your ISP in order to reach--for example--Netflix (allowing you a 5mbps cap), but if you actually want to watch a movie or TV show, then Netflix has to pay your ISP, too, for enough capacity to allow steaming (huh? you mean 5mbps wasn't enough to begin with?).

With ISPs like this, who needs criminals?

(Actually, they'll just do what they do now: drop every third packet by allowing the allocated ports at the "peering points" (now that's a misnomer if ever there was one) to get saturated with traffic, holding your traffic hostage until someone/anyone pays the ransom.)

Securing is more incriminating

»www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/20 ··· fi.html?"However the recent home router security failings have also shown that no security is perfect and a hacker can still break into systems that might otherwise appear to be secure. But if this happens the home owner could perhaps end up looking even guiltier than had they just left their wifi network open in the first place, which offers a defence."